To celebrate the publication of a Spanish-language translation Margaret Sanger’s Family Limitation’s in Merida, Mexico, her grandson Alexander Sanger wrote the following new introduction:La brújula del hogar

“In the summer and fall of 1914, my grandmother, Margaret Sanger, nascent birth control advocate and a public health nurse in New York, wrote a pamphlet entitled, Family Limitation, in which she described various methods of contraception which she recommended to enable couples to plan, space and limit their children. It was this pamphlet that was translated into Spanish as La Brujula del Hogar and published in Merida in 1922.
My grandmother, a mother of three, knew what she was talking about, not just because she had only three children, but because she had been working in the poorest slums of New York City, taking care of mothers who had children they did not want and could not afford. She often talked of one patient, Sadie Sachs, who in 1912 went to a back alley abortionist and almost died in the attempt. My grandmother nursed her back to health. When the doctor made his final visit, Sadie Sachs asked what she could do to not have any more children. The doctor responded,”“So you want to have your cake and eat it too. The answer is, tell Jake (her husband) to sleep on the roof.’”

“Three months later, Sadie Sachs was pregnant again, went to a back alley abortionist and died in my grandmother’s arms.”

“My grandmother said, ‘Enough.’”

“She went to Europe to research contraceptive methods and put all her knowledge of methods available in the United States and in Europe into Family Limitation.”

“In the United States at that time, both the Federal Government and the states had Comstock Laws, which prohibited the dissemination of birth control information and supplies. The laws also criminalized advocating the legality of birth control.”

“In March of 1914, my grandmother announced in the first issue of her monthly newspaper, The Woman Rebel, her intention to ‘advocate the prevention of conception’ and ‘impart such knowledge in the columns of this paper.’ She never actually imparted any contraceptive information in The Woman Rebel, but nonetheless the authorities confiscated the newspaper. In it she first used the phrase ‘birth control.’ My grandmother kept printing the paper and the government kept confiscating it, and finally indicted her on obscenity charges, since birth control under the Comstock laws was considered ‘obscene.’”

“The indictment made headlines, spreading birth control far beyond the limited readership of her paper and agitating women and men to support her cause.”

“She decided to ‘give them (the government) something to really indict me on,’ she wrote to her muckraker friend, Upton Sinclair. She printed 100,000 copies of Family Limitation. It was immediately translated into multiple languages, including in 1919 and again in 1922 into Spanish. Her willingness to put women’s rights and health above the law launched the United States birth control movement, and soon the worldwide movement.”

“What my grandmother saw in the slums of New York and on her visits to Mexico (she made at least a half dozen), was enormous inequality between the classes. In New York and in poorer areas of the United States, the rich and poor often lived near each other but had vastly different incomes, access to health care and numbers of children, both born and surviving. There were scandalously high infant and maternal mortality rates. If women used contraception, it was a traditional method, often ineffective if not dangerous, and when it failed, the women often resorted to unsafe abortion. There were Sadie Saches in Mexico as well as New York, and my grandmother vowed to put an end to it. In her campaign she was repeatedly imprisoned but she never wavered.”

“Imprisonment also seemed likely for the translators, printers and publishers of La Brujula del Hogar in 1922. The pamphlet fell into the hands of birth control opponents in Merida, the Knights of Columbus, who drew up a petition seeking the prosecution of the publishers. Newspapers took both sides, cartoonists got busy, public became aroused and Birth Control became the most discussed topic of the hour. The first edition of the pamphlet, all 5,000 copies, was exhausted in one day, and a second edition of 10,000 copies was immediately re-printed.”

“The Knights of Columbus petition was forwarded on from the District Attorney, Arturo Cisneros Canto, to the Governor of Yucatan, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, who at once remitted instructions to refuse it. Incidentally, Carrillo, a Socialist, was one of 14 children. In compliance, District Attorney Canto issued a statement published in the March 14 Diario Official, which was reprinted in Meridá newspapers, which said, in part:”

“The Attorney General’s Office cannot shape its manner of proceedings to the narrow-minded and antiquated criteria of morality, the result of deep-rooted religious prejudices, which crops out in your petition. The Executive of the State wishes to have it made clear that forever have gone the prosecutions, which have no other cause than moral fanaticism, which filled with horror the vast period of clerical domination of the Middle Ages. As long as the present socialist government directs public destiny, the Attorney General’s office will not undertake any prosecutions for futile ideas of morality, since prosecutions in the name of morality have at all times been the most odious pretext of which religion made use so as to destroy its enemies.”

“My grandmother touted the Yucatan government’s support of birth control, noting that Arturo Cisneros Canto’s statement’“is a remarkable document and one that might be recommended to the attention of police departments in some American cities–especially in New York, where a meeting for the discussion of the morality of birth control was broken up not six months ago.’”

“The Yucatan’s socialist experiment was short-lived. In 1924 Governor Carrillo Puerto was assassinated, and support for feminist and socialist reforms there evaporated. But, as historian Dan La Botz noted, ‘revolutionary Yucatan set the long-term agenda of the Mexican women’s movement, and many of its demands are still being fought for.’”

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Today is the 99th anniversary of the day Margaret Sanger opened this nation’s first birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn. We thought this was a good opportunity to revisit that event from Sanger’s own reminiscences. In an article entitled, “Why I Went to Jail,” published in February 1960, she recalled,

“It was a crisp, bright morning on October 16, 1916, in Brooklyn, N.Y., that I opened the doors of the first birth-control clinic in the United States. I believed then, and do today, that this was an event of social significance in the lives of American womanhood. ” She wrote. “Three years before, as a professional nurse, I had gone with a doctor on a call in New York’s lower East Side. I had watched a frail mother die from a self-induced abortion. The doctor previously had refused to give her contraceptive information. The mother was one of a thousand such cases; in New York alone there were over 100,000 abortions a year. That night I knew I could not go on merely nursing, allowing mothers to suffer and die. . . . It was the beginning of my birth-control crusade.”
Sanger’s biggest concern was whether the women would come to clinic. She need not have worried. As she described it,

Sanger and Fania Mindell

“Halfway to the corner they stood in line, shawled, hatless, their red hands clasping the chapped smaller ones of their children. All day long and far into the evening, in ever-increasing numbers they came, over 100 the opening day. Jews and Christians, Protestants and Roman Catholics alike made their confessions to us. . . .Every day the little waiting room was crowded. The women came in pairs, with friends, married daughters, some with nursing babies clasped in their arms. Women from the far end of Long Island, the press having spread the word, from Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. They came to learn the ‘secret’ which was possessed by the rich and denied the poor.”
She continued, “My sister and I lectured to eight women at a time on the basic techniques of contraception, referring them to a druggist to purchase the necessary equipment. Records were meticulously kept. It was vital to have complete case histories if our work was to have scientific value. We also gave many of the women copies of What Every Girl Should Know, a brief booklet I had written earlier.”

The stories of the women were indeed tragic. “One woman told of her 15 children. Six were living. ‘I’m 37 years old. Look at me! I might be 50!’ Then there was a reluctantly pregnant Jewish woman who, after bringing eight children to birth, had two abortions and heaven knows how many miscarriages. Worn out, not only from housework but from making hats in a sweatshop, nervous beyond words, she cried morbidly, ‘If you don’t help me, I’m going to chop up a glass and swallow it.’ I comforted her the best I could, but there was nothing I would do to interrupt her pregnancy. We believed in birth control, not abortion.”

But the clinic was not always a tragic scene. Sanger recalled how they were cheered by neighbors. “The grocer’s wife on the corner dropped in to wish us luck, and the jolly old German baker whose wife gave out handbills to everybody passing the door sent us doughnuts. Then Mrs. Rabinowitz would call to us, ‘If I bring some hot tea now, will you stop the people coming?’ The postman delivering his 50 to 100 letters daily had his little pleasantry, ‘Farewell ladies; hope I find you here tomorrow.’”
He was right—their time was growing short. Sanger wrote, “On the ninth day, a well-dressed, hard-faced woman pushed her way past the humble applicants, gave her name, flaunted a $2 bill, payment for What Every Girl Should Know, and demanded immediate attention. My colleague had a hunch she might be a detective, and pinned the bill on the wall and wrote: ‘Received from Mrs. ——— of the Police Department, as her contribution.’” The following afternoon, according to Sanger, on Oct. 26, “the policewoman again pushed her way through the group of patiently waiting women and, striding into my room, snapped peremptorily, ‘You, Margaret Sanger, are under arrest.’”

Sanger was arrested, tried, convicted and spent 30 days in the queens County Penitentiary. But she went on to lead a crusade to make birth control legal, safe, effective, inexpensive and available to all women regardless of race, religion or ethnicity. Can we still be struggling to ensure women’s reproductive rights 99 years later?

Margaret Sanger began publishing the Birth Control Review in 1917 as a means to help build a birth control movement. By 1921 the monthly journal had become the official organ of the American Birth Control League, and included news of birth control activities, articles by scholars, activists, and writers on birth control, and reviews of books and other publications. The Review even included art and fiction in the form of cartoons, poetry and short stories.

Karla K. Gower and Vanessa Murphree recently published “Making Birth Control Respectable” in American Journalism, an article that looked at underlying messages about eugenics and Neo-Malthusianism (overpopulation) found in the Review.

To understand how eugenics and population were treated by the Review, it is important to understand the context in which the journal appeared. Gower and Murprhee argue that the topic of birth control was not publicly acceptable in the 1920s. Anything that related to reproduction was thought to belong in the private sphere. Public discussion of such matters made people uncomfortable. The Gower and Murphree argue that women were “relegated to the home” and were expected to uphold the virtues of the cult of domesticity–piety, purity, submission and domesticity.[1] Thus, birth control was seen as taboo.

Mailing information about birth control was also illegal, thanks to the 1873 Comstock Act, which made it a federal offense to send information about contraceptives in the mail. The Comstock Act also inspired states to further criminalize birth control. Gower and Murphree indicated that fourteen states prohibited the verbal transmission of information about contraception or abortion, while eleven others made possession of instructions for the prevention of pregnancy a criminal offense.[2]

Page of the Morning Oregonian, published in June 1916. “Censorship is Attacked.”

But this did not stop Sanger and the American Birth Control League from mailing out the Review, though it probably had some impact the kinds of material the journal published. The main goal of the Review was to secure public support for birth control, to attract the support of doctors, legislators, academics, and the middle class and wealthy society women who formed the backbone of local birth control leagues.

This is where the undertones of eugenics and Neo-Malthusianism come in.

Sanger understood that there needed to be political accommodation in order to publish material on birth control. The Comstock Act, along with similar state laws, still existed. So Sanger and her supporters had to find a way to disseminate the information that they needed to without engaging in a full on battle with the law.

The answer lay in appealing to a greater audience and breaking their belief that birth control was a taboo. This audience was the white middle and upper classes.

But why would the BCR want to reach these classes? Were not most of the writings concerned with the impoverished classes, the women who could not afford to have undesired children?

In Sanger’s autobiography, My Fight for Birth Control, she writes:

The answer was to make the club women, the women of wealth and intelligence, use their power and money and influence to obtain freedom and knowledge for the women of the poor. The women of leisure must listen. The women of wealth must give. The women of influence must protest.

(p. 191)

Sanger concluded that although it was working class women who needed the most aid, it was the “club women” who would have the necessary influence and resources to promote the birth control movement.

Although the article demonstrates that the subject of eugenics in the BCR was a matter of tactic, it is important to note that
for Sanger, eugenics wasn’t just a strategy.

Eugenic theory developed in the United States during the early twentieth century. Individuals, including Margaret Sanger, believed that there were certain ways to promote a healthier population. Sanger, in particular, established ideas on when women should avoid giving birth. These ideas included women being at least 22 years old so that she can “attain a ripe physical and mental development” and when she is working since “society remains indifferent to the needs of her offspring and forces them to toil in mills and factories.

(Vol. 1: The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928, p.243-244)

The BCR was a magazine serving as a publication to discuss the justifications of birth control.[3] The upper class readers of these stories would have emotional reactions to reading the unfortunate stories and letters of poor women.[4]

By speaking to this audience, the topic of birth control would be public and legal with social changes could come to fruition.

What this audience tended to want to hear during this time were discussions on eugenics and Neo-Malthusianism.

These topics concerned the strengthening of gene pools and the controlling of overpopulation, respectively. More importantly, the supporters of both were concerned with quality over quantity.[5]

Does this sound familiar?

Quite. Think about the BCR and the birth control movement in general. The primary goals included decreasing the number of undesired births in poorer populations in order to improve the quality of life for the poorer families.

Now, Sanger and the BCR editors had to be careful about using eugenics to further promote birth control in the public sphere. The idea was not to make greater white middle and upper class families, rather, the intersection of these movements was to support the idea to ensure that families had the right to control the size of their family and that women had the right to control their bodies.[6]

The following excerpt describes the general perspective on eugenics in the birth control movement:

Margaret Sanger and leaders of the birth control movement, predominantly women, believed that people should be empowered, by education, to make choices to limit their own reproduction. In a society that frowned on open discussion of sexuality and where physicians knew little about the biology of reproduction, Sanger advocated that mothers be given access to the scientific information needed to thoughtfully plan conception.

The conclusion of this intersection, in the perspective of the BCR, was that the access to knowledge about contraceptives and effective family spacing would give women the ability to “eliminate the unfit [population].”[7]

Cover of the BCR published in February 1926. Slogan, “Fewer Children Better Born,” suggests that birth control would lead to a healthier population.

In addition to addressing the question of increasing an “unfit” population, there was the question of overpopulation.

Neo-Malthusians supported using scientific advancement, in this case birth control, to impede the growing world population as it was assumed to be constrained by inadequate food production.

Sanger, after hearing a speech given by Frank Vanderlip concerning the growing population of Europe and their possible reliance on American food sources, saw the potential in incorporating this argument in the birth control movement.[8]

Though Murphree and Gower emphasize that the inclusion of Neo-Malthusian ideals was a way to reach a broader range of supporters, it is important to understand that Margaret Sanger’s ideas had been influenced by the Neo-Maltusian movement. In 1914, Sanger found herself in England being introduced to the leaders of the Malthusian League. This is where she first learned of the advocacy for using artificial contraception to control population growth. The League’s program gave Sanger new arguments that would increase the appeal of the legalization of birth control
(Vol 1: The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928, p. 94.)

So you see? Both the incorporation of eugenics and neo-Malthusian ideas were also communication tactics!

Sanger effectively used the appeal of the eugenics and overpopulation movements to further the birth control movement.

What was the BCR able to communicate with these associations?

Everything converged to demonstrate that birth control would give women the liberty to control their bodies and therefore, control the number of children they had. This would naturally lead to a healthier population.

On June 30 and July 1, 1916, newspapers across the country publicized Margaret Sanger’s arrest in Portland on June 29. Along with Sanger, Dr. Marie Equi, Mrs. Florence A. Greatwood, and Maude Bonner were also arrested, and the papers noted that “several other women clamored to be arrested on the same charge.” The meeting itself had attracted a substantial crowd. Bail was set at $25, but Mrs. Greatwood was the only one who accepted it. The other three women spent the night in jail and remained there on June 30, pending a hearing. After conferring with a lawyer, the women decided to demand a jury trial.

Sanger had held a protest meeting on June 29 because three workers, Carl Rave, Ralph Chervin, and E. L. Jenkins, had been arrested for selling her birth control pamphlet, Family Limitation, on June 19. As a result, the City Council declared on June 23 that Family Limitation was obscene in order to prohibit further distribution. The trial of the three men was postponed in order to allow Sanger to finish her speaking tour before going back to Portland to act as an expert witness. She returned to find her pamphlet outlawed and Portland women passing out leaflets saying, “Shall five men legislate in secret against ten thousand women?”

The two cases — that of the three men and that of the four women — were tried together on July 1. The Deputy City Attorney argued for the prosecution that “the evidence shows that these circulars, or pamphlets, were distributed promiscuously at the meetings held… These pamphlets should not be circulated here or anywhere else!”

The attorney for the defense, Isaac Swett, compared Family Limitation to another book purchased that very morning at a bookstore, stating that in that book, there was “language much clearer, much more shocking, to persons unaccustomed to it, than can be found in the pamphlet!” He argued that the language of Sanger’s pamphlet was specifically chosen to avoid misunderstandings by women unaccustomed to reading about such topics and was in “the best interests of humanity.” The article about the trial in the Sunday Oregonian on July 2 noted that, following Swett’s defense, “the clerk’s gavel abruptly checked the impetuous patter of feminine hand-clapping.”

Swett was assisted by Colonel C. E. S. Wood, who argued that the definition of “obscenity” in literature was utterly arbitrary. If Sanger’s pamphlet was to be banned as obscene, he said, parts of the Old Testament were also obscene and thus the Bible would need to be banned, and so would the works of Rabelais, both of which he could go and buy at any bookstore. He closed on an impassioned statement: “I say it with regret, we’re a backwoods town. We’re the only town in the country that’s doing this thing. I know, and your honor knows, that this has come to stay!”

Judge Langguth postponed his decision until Friday, July 7. On July 5, the Morning Oregonian invited the public to a “Margaret Sanger rally” to be held at the Spiritualist Temple, with several speakers, including Sanger herself. The following day, a lengthy article covered the meeting, at which Dr. Chapman bemoaned Portland’s “medieval, inquisitorial, petty-minded mediocrities” of city officials. Sanger argued that “if two people behave at all in the marriage relation, they must have knowledge of the methods of preventive of conception.” And, of course, before the police “moral squad” arrived, copies of Family Limitation were for sale to attendees.

On July 7, Judge Langguth found the defendants guilty of distributing obscene and indecent material. His decision rested on the “assumption that matter not necessarily obscene when offered for sale in bookstores, or for use in medical clinics, becomes obscene when circulated publicly if it is of a nature calculated to excite lascivious thought in youthful minds,” according to the Morning Oregonian’s coverage. The men were fined $10 each but not required to pay, and the women were not fined at all.

Margaret Sanger responded to the decision:

“I consider it a cowardly decision. It was painful, really, to listen to a man of his intelligence crawling verbally, and he crawled. It’s practically the same old story, that knowledge, if it’s hidden away on musty bookshelves or in the narrow confines of the medical profession, is moral; but as soon as it is distributed among the working people the same book becomes obscene. It is the same decision that has been handed down from the days of witchcraft. It is disappointing that in this 20th century, in the day of electricity and modern scientific triumphs, the judicial mind is in the same groove.”

Later, in her 1938 Autobiography, Sanger noted that “the papers made a great to-do about the affair but it was not a type of publicity of my choosing and did little to bring the goal nearer.” However, the publicity did lead to an increase in demand for copies of Family Limitation.

Marie Equi

Dr. Marie Equi, who was also arrested, met Sanger in Portland earlier in 1916 and helped her to revise Family Limitation. In addition to her work as a physician and providing abortions, she was active in the radical labor movement and the women’s suffrage movement, as well as fighting for protective legislation for women and children.

For news coverage of the events of June and July 1916, see, among others, “Book Sale Stopped: Council Act Brands Mrs. Sanger’s Pamphlet as Obscene, Criticism Induces Action,” The Morning Oregonian, Portland, OR, June 24, 1916; “Mrs. Sanger Arrested, Three Other Women Also Held for Holding Meeting of Protest,” Altoona Mirror, June 30, 1916; “Mrs. Sanger Arrested,” The Morning Echo, Bakersfield, CA, July 1, 1916;“Sanger Cases are Now Up to Court: Concluding Arguments Compare Book with Others to be Found on Sale, Law Declared Absurd,” The Sunday Oregonian, July 2, 1916; “Margaret Sanger Rally is Tonight,” The Morning Oregonian, July 5, 1916; “Officials are Hit: Sanger Protest Meeting Brings Roast for Mayor, Others Called Names,” The Morning Oregonian, July 6, 1916; and “Mrs. Sanger’s Book Declared Obscene,” The Morning Oregonian, July 8, 1916. On Dr. Marie Equi, see “Changing the Face of Medicine: Dr. Marie Diana Equi,” at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Also see MS’ article in The Malthusian, September 1916, pp. 83-84, MSM S1:638-640, and MS’ Autobiography. For a summary of Sanger’s eventful 1916 tour, see Sanger, “A Birth Control Lecture Tour,” Aug. 6, 1916.

Ninety-one years ago, Margaret Sanger and the newborn American Birth Control League scored a publicity coup when, on the request of New York’s archbishop Patrick Hayes, the New York City police department suppressed a public meeting on birth control. This event put the birth control movement and its leader on the front pages of New York papers and won the support of many of New York’s liberal elite. The Town Hall raid serves as an example of how Sanger’s media prowess turned what could have been a crushing blow for the new organization into a public relations triumph that featured the hubris of a Roman Catholic Archbishop.

The Town Hall, at 123 West 43rd Street, was opened in January 1921 by the League for Political Action, a pro-suffrage group, as a venue for educational meetings, lectures, concerts, and poetry readings. Sanger had booked the hall for the final session of the First American Birth Control Conference (held November 10-13), an historic gathering of prominent scientists, physicians, demographers and eugenicists, as well as social workers, birth control advocates and socialites. During the first two days of sessions, the attendees discussed the global ramifications of birth control and its potential to lessen the major social ills of the world at the Hotel McAlpin. The conference also launched the American Birth Control League (ABCL) to promote birth control through education and lobbying.

Margaret Sanger, ca. 1922

In 1944, Sanger looked back at the Town Hall Raid when asked by a high school girl “What do you find to do with yourself these days, Mrs. Sanger, now that your fight for birth control has been won?”

After I’d assured her that the “fight” was still very much in progress I thought back to the days when it had been just that. Birth control, fifteen, twenty years ago was a lurid and sensational topic. Issues were clear cut and direct. The very term was one not mentioned in polite society, thanks to Anthony Comstock who had Congress classify it with “obscene, and filthy literature” in the legislative ban against it. Our struggles lacked the dignity they have today. Back in 1921, Harold Cox, brilliant member of the English Parliament and Editor of the Edinburgh Review was to speak with me at that early forum of free speech, Town Hall. Our subject was “Birth Control: Is it Moral?”

This final keynote address was to be open to the public. However, as Sanger told it:

With astonishing directness Roman Catholic Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes, through his emissary Monsignor Joseph P. Dineen, closed the meeting before it even opened. We had grown accustomed to opposition, from the combination of the Comstock group even after his death, with the Roman Catholic hierarchy, but never had the interference been so brutally direct before. Time and again theatres, ballrooms where I was to speak were ordered closed before the meeting could be held. In city after city this occurred during the years, 1916, ‘17 and ‘18, but the climax was the now famous Town Hall incident which raised the issue throughout the country.

Sanger managed to get inside Town Hall when the doors were opened to let members of the audience leave.

I wedged my way in a side entrance under the arm of a protecting officer who mistook me for one of the “press.” Harold Cox had by this time managed to reach the platform. An officer barred the platform steps to me. Harold hauled me up beside the steps, grabbed a bunch of flowers from a bewildered messenger boy and shouted to the audience, ‘Don’t leave! Here’s Mrs. Sanger,’ thrusting the flowers which were to have been presented as a grand finale into my hand.

The vast audience, many of them important doctors and scientists, who had begun to leave their seats, returned. I began to talk but could not be heard. Ten times I tried to speak forcing the police finally to do what I wanted, deny me the right of free speech by arresting me.

The incident escalated when the press reported that New York Archdiocese had pressured the police to shut the meeting down. A representative of Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes telephoned police headquarters shortly before the meeting, and the Archbishop sent his secretary, Monsignor Joseph P. Dineen, to meet with Captain Donahue. Sanger had invited Hayes to the meeting, hoping that a Church official would rebut her claim and provide good fodder for the press. She may even have hoped that her invitation would stimulate Church interference.

Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes, ca. 1922

Dineen defended the suppression in the daily papers: “Decent and clean-minded people would not discuss a subject such as birth control in public before children [he claimed four children were present at the meeting; they turned out to be four Barnard College students with “bobbed hair and short skirts”] or at all.” The police action was necessary, he added, because birth control “attacks the very foundations of human society.” (New York Times, Nov. 15, 1921) Archbishop Hayes issued a statement a week later claiming that “The laws of God and man, science, public policy, human experience are all condemnatory of birth control as preached by a few irresponsible individuals. . . .” He then referred to the recent Eugenics conference in New York as evidence of a scientific repudiation of birth control, as it promoted the fertility of the “better born.” He even went so far as to recite a startling anti-Christian, eugenic directive that “more children from the well-to-do” was a “moral duty.” (New York Times, Nov. 21, 1921) Although Dineen and Hayes admitted that a call was placed to the police in opposition to the meeting, they refused to acknowledge their power to guide or manipulate the police department.

The mass meeting to discuss “Birth Control – Is It Moral?” was rescheduled for November 18 at the Park Theater. Once again Sanger invited Archbishop Hayes, along with Catholic University sociologist, Monsignor John A. Ryan, and John Sumner, head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Only Hayes sent a representative. The meeting took place without incident.

What did Sanger take from her victory?

We had the hierarchy to thank for so publicizing our meeting that the second held shortly after, at the big Park Theatre in Columbus Circle was packed fifteen minutes after a single door was opened. Two thousand people, many of whom had never heard of birth control before Cardinal Hayes gave it nation-wide publicity, stood outside clamoring to get in, even climbing up the fire escapes. Orators were haranguing from soapboxes, men were pounding each other with their fists. Paulist fathers sold anti-birth control pamphlets.

The press kept the birth control publicity alive for weeks, the New York Times going so far as to headline the fact that Archbishop Hayes had closed the meeting. The most conservative papers were placed in the trying situation of defending birth control advocates or endorsing a violation of the principle of free speech, which ‘must always find defenders if democracy is to survive.’”

The hierarchy had turned a simple unheralded meeting into a cause celebre, giving our movement more publicity than it could have acquired in years of proceeding simply and scientifically on its way impeded.

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